1989
Make.Money.Fast
The chain letter that became the first thing the networked world forwarded to itself at scale.
You might remember it as Dave Rhodes chain letter
A post
- SourceNo single original
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
A letter signed "Dave Rhodes" describes a repossessed car, an unemployment cheque that ran out, and then a cruise, a Lincoln Town Car bought for cash and a house on the Florida coast. The reader is told to post a dollar to each of five names, add their own name to the bottom, and forward the list. It is a pyramid scheme in plain text, and it moved through dial-up bulletin boards, Usenet newsgroups and email from 1989 onwards under the filename MAKE.MONEY.FAST.
It first appeared in 1989.
It is the ancestor of internet virality as a mechanism rather than a metaphor: a message whose entire content is an instruction to copy it. Anti-spam culture, the word "spam" as a term of art, Usenet moderation norms and the first serious arguments about what a network owes its users all formed partly in reaction to it. Decades later it was still circulating, name and dollar figures mutated, through email inboxes.
The Guardian went looking for Dave Rhodes in 2003 and could not establish that he had ever existed. The letter's descendants — the Nigerian-prince advance-fee mail, the Bill Gates beta-test hoax, every "forward this to ten people" message — are the direct line from a 1935 Denver postal chain letter to the modern inbox.
Related
Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- A letter signed "Dave Rhodes" describes a repossessed car, an unemployment cheque that ran out, and then a cruise, a Lincoln Town Car bought for cash and a house on the Florida coast. The reader is told to post a dollar to each of five names, add their own name to the bottom, and forward the list. It is a pyramid scheme in plain text, and it moved through dial-up bulletin boards, Usenet newsgroups and email from 1989 onwards under the filename MAKE.MONEY.FAST.